Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity - Hardcover

Struever, Nancy S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226777480 ISBN 13: 9780226777481

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Since antiquity, philosophy and rhetoric have traditionally been cast as rivals, with the former often lauded as a search for logical truth and the latter usually disparaged as empty speech. But in this erudite intellectual history, Nancy S. Struever stakes out a claim for rhetoric as the more productive form of inquiry.

Struever views rhetoric through the lens of modality, arguing that rhetoric’s guiding interest in what is possible—as opposed to philosophy’s concern with what is necessary—makes it an ideal tool for understanding politics. Innovative readings of Hobbes and Vico allow her to reexamine rhetoric’s role in the history of modernity and to make fascinating connections between thinkers from the classical, early modern, and modern periods. From there she turns to Walter Benjamin, reclaiming him as an exemplar of modernist rhetoric and a central figure in the long history of the form. Persuasive and perceptive, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity is a novel rewriting of the history of rhetoric and a heady examination of the motives, issues, and flaws of contemporary inquiry.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy S. Struever is professor emerita in the History Department and the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History.

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Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity

By NANCY S. STRUEVER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-77748-1

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................viiList of Abbreviations..........................................................ixCHAPTER 1. Introduction: The Classical Background..............................1CHAPTER 2. The Modernity of Early Modernity....................................9Hobbes and Rhetorised Psychology...............................................13Possibilities in Motion........................................................14Hobbes and Rhetorised Argument.................................................25Possible Agency and Possible Plot..............................................36Vico: An Alternate Scenario....................................................42Possible Agency................................................................42Rhetoric and Legal Possibility.................................................45Possible Plots.................................................................53Hobbes and Vico................................................................58CHAPTER 3. From Early to Late Modernity........................................66Modality Sorts.................................................................71An Exemplary Modernism.........................................................80CHAPTER 4. Modernizing Rhetoric: Recuperation and Response.....................89New Rhetorics..................................................................98A Modernist Contest of Faculties...............................................102CHAPTER 5. Inquiry Possibilities...............................................107Conclusion: Using Possibilities................................................117Notes..........................................................................131Index..........................................................................153

Chapter One

Introduction: The Classical Background

This essay considers rhetoric as, simply, a kind of inquiry, and argues the importance of a specific investigative interest, simultaneously basic, pervasive, and elusive—modality. "Modal rhetorics" need to be juxtaposed to modal logics. Rhetorical interests, tasks, performances—all are informed by the press of possibility, the discrimination of the actual, the response to necessity and contingency. And rhetoric as hermeneutic, as a specific, traditional contribution to understanding civil interests, tasks, performances, carried in texts, signs, deeply engages modality as primary quality of civil experience. Modal logics may define structures of validity, inferential sequences; modal rhetorics deal in patterns of use. My interest is in mode as color or valence, regarded as of the utmost importance to issues of political capacity and action.

Briefly, I am assuming that in civil inquiry the opposition philosophical /rhetorical inquiry is of intrinsic interest; that an inquiry's allegiance to a particular modality defines its most basic strategies; and that the mechanics of representing a modal allegiance generate a refined, perspicuous account of investigative goals. The Classical, and archetypical "contest of faculties," rhetoric vs. philosophy, originated, and persisted, not simply as a rivalry of pedagogic practices and academic interests, but as a conflict of claims and counter-claims concerning morality, truth, and utility in inquiry, an opposition that resurfaces in attenuated or exaggerated form throughout pre-modernity, and, I shall argue, informs, still, the issues of morality, truth, and utility in Modernist political investigations.

Yet, the history of rhetoric describes its interests as carried in a most dishevelled rhetorical tradition, a very large body of practical manuals and theoretical expositions, containing "a very loose, indeed, ramshackle collection of discursive problems and solutions, all stained—dyed, to use Montaigne's metaphor—by a discursive pessimism: by the heavy constraints of negative definitions of the nature of human discursive capacity, and of the relation of discursive to cognitive capacity; by the embodiment of discursive practice in a matrix of communicative needs; and by the close relationship of communicative need to political possibility." And, rhetoric's consuming interest in possibility, thus modality, is key, not simply to the Classical opposition of rhetoric and philosophy as an originary defining moment in inquiry, distinguishing oppositional beliefs and procedures, but key as well to the issue of "modernizing." In discriminating rhetoric's engrossment with possibility, it specifies rhetoric's peculiar civil capacities, and makes a case as well for rhetoric's remarkable capacity for renewal, for "modernizing," the reinvention of its civil strategies in response to novel civil affairs. As corollary, the history of philosophy describes the positives and negatives of philosophy's allegiance to systemic necessity, and its capacity for systemic renewal, with its modal commitment to necessitarian truth. Still, the opposition should work, not as an exhaustive binary opposition, not as an insoluble antinomy, but as a vivifying argument about values and procedures, giving rise to novelty and careful correction. "Modernizing" rhetoric is mapping the current possibilities of investigative innovation and critique in the civil operations rhetoric properly regards as its domain. And, as we shall see, "the massive presence of contingency" Robert Pippin attributes to the high culture of Modernity requires the modern investigators' zealous canvassing of possibilities, a devotion to range of response.

The description of rhetoric as inquiry should employ, in my view, the Peircian pragmatic approach, advocated in his "Fixation of Beliefs" and his "How to Make Our Ideas Clear"; where he claims the investigative core is the set of beliefs that generate the habits of action in inquiry. Inquiry is simply "the struggle to attain a state of belief" (FB, 47); the sole motive of thought is to produce beliefs ..."; "the essence of belief is the establishment of habit [rule of action]" (HMIC, 13). Peirce's linkage of beliefs and habits gives us a formula marked by modesty and, happily, "rhetoricalness." The modesty, or radical inclusiveness, is of use to the consideration of inquiry in general, while the rhetorical values resonate with rhetoric's topical concerns: its engagement with a community's beliefs, shared opinions (endoxa), and with rhetoric's inveterate habits of activity, persuasion as practice and goal.

He offers a narrative of investigative process as continuous, "possibly" open-ended, with the goal of truth, or the desired definition of reality, as something the community "settles down to" (RN, 555), "in the long run" (C, 39). It is essentially in motion, moving from doubt, not as original position, as the skeptic's hyperbolic doubt, but as "irritant," to fixation, (temporary) stabilizing of belief. The process is "only that of valid inference," but, "every sort of modification of consciousness—Attention, Sensation, Understanding—is an inference" (C, 33); the entire range of consciousness is "a sign resulting from inference" (C, 40). It is a process autochthonous, simple, practical, possible. The identity of a habit is how it may lead us to act, "not only under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur"; "there is no meaning so fine as to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226777480
• ISBN 13: 9780226777481
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 158
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar